Uses for the SUV You Can’t Afford

As we just , with rising gas prices SUVs are becoming even more impractical and are glutting the used-car market. Brian Unger, in his Unger Report segment on NPR’s Day to Day asks the question, “What to do with your SUV now that it’s bigger than your bank account?”

Now, councils Unger, is the time for compassion for SUV owners, not ridicule. While we’ll revel in “I told you so” for a little while, we need to move on and offer constructive feedback to those stuck owning SUVs, unable to sell them off.

From the Unger Report, Things you can do with you SUV now that you can’t afford to drive it:

Live in it. A mobile home that doesn’t make you feel trashy. Or gauche.

As always with cars like these, it’s not just the pollution whilst in use you have to consider, but also the environmental cost of construction that you have to think about. Hybrids that cause 1/10th the road pollution of normal cars are pointless if their construction outweighs the benefit (compared to a normal car).

And of course, the solar panels are only really viable in warm(/sunny) areas during the day in summer.
Although, that being said, there are many thing effecting the efficiency of solar cars, and this car may have improved on them enough to make it still viable in less than peak conditions.

And a feature which I haven’t seen on any solar cars yet (although I may have simply missed it) is the ability to plug the car in to your house, not so it takes electricity, but so if the car battery is full, the solar panels will provide extra energy for your home.

I agree, Clinch – to really weigh the impact of anything requires a cradle-to-grave assessment (or better still – cradle-to-cradle with components of recycling built into the design). Most arguments I’ve seen against more efficient hybrid cars (the Hummer vs. Prius argument, for example) don’t hold water. As batteries improve, the extra resources/pollution that go into their creation and exposure are outweighed many times over by their benefits. Add pedal power and solar panels into the equation and, i suspect, the picture looks even rosier…

Why not petition Honda or better yet, GM to produce a hybrid like Solo but without the pedals. Americans are lazy and don’t want to peddle their car. No wonder the windows are tinted so you cannot look in and see them working there. The technology for combining solar and gas with a plug-in is available now. Why not have America produce the car?